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Thursday, 14 September 2017

If you’re wondering about the title, it’s what me and my
husband-to-be call equal marriage. Yes, I am to be wed this coming Saturday to
my partner of 11 years. It’s all getting a bit hectic and exciting in the
run-up to the Big Day. Rather fortuitously, this momentous occasion in my life
has coincided with me reading a lot of queer theory for my current research on LGBTQ
housing and homelessness.
This literature been a bit of a revelation – I’ve dived into it like a
contestant on Drag Race would dive
into a dressing-up box. Part of why I’m coming to this late in my academic
career is related to the broader theme of this post – in my academic career
to-date I’ve ignored my own queerness focusing on mainstream policy studies
which has helped advance my career. This will be the topic of another post
later.

The crashing together of getting gay marriaged and queer
theory has been interesting and I thought I’d share a couple of insights.

Firstly,

HETEROSEXUALS, MARRIAGE IS SO INCREDIBLY FUCKING GENDERED
IT IS UNTRUE AND YOU REALLY NEED TO DO SOMETHING ABOUT THAT.

My first awareness
of this was when I first announced my engagement at work the Monday after my
partner proposed. I was chairing a meeting and as an ice-breaker I asked people
to share an interesting bit of non-work news when they were introducing myself.
I came last and my news was my engagement (I was actually trying to think of
something else to share; make of that what you will). The women in the room
whooped with joy and immediately followed it up with questions about the
details of the proposal and when the wedding was going to be. This took up a
good five minutes; the men in the meeting looked bored and had clearly mentally
moved onto item five on the agenda.

And this has basically continued ever since. We had a wait a
long time before actual wedding planning got going as we’re members of the
congregation of the Church of St John the Evangelist on Princes Street, part of
the Scottish Episcopal Church. We were waiting for the Synod of the church to
change the Canon Law to allow same-sex marriage, which they did (I
heard the news via Twitter on the train home from work, and cried quite a lot).
As planning got going this gendered divide about wedding discussions continued –
I couldn’t briefly mention it to women without getting the Spanish Inquisition
treatment, whereas men, on the whole, could not give a fuck. I started
mentioning this and it was interesting how heterosexuals found this irritating
too. One women explained how her husband organised her wedding and she actually
got very angry at the number of people who questioned this. Another male friend
explained how they equally shared tasks, and similarly was angry that people
were aghast. In culture, this divide that weddings are women’s work is
recreated in things like Don’t Tell the
Bride.

I suppose this came as such a shock to me as the discourse
around marriage has changed so much. It’s all about “partnership” and the
inroads of feminism have made it less of an imposition of patriarchal power in
our society. The weddings I’ve attended (oh, so many weddings…) really, I
thought, reflected the input of both people in the couple; I rarely considered
that it was mainly a woman’s work. What my experiences have led me to consider
is that this profound gendering really demonstrates how far the institution of
heterosexual marriage has to go until it becomes something more equal. This
behaviour, for me, demonstrates how still marriage is something women must
aspire to – hence the focus on the “big day” – and it’s something that men must
be subject to – hence their lack of interest.

This also demonstrates how marriage is one of the everyday
ways in which patriarchal heterosexuality is remade as the norm in our society.
As a young gay man I thought I would never, ever get married, let alone married
in a church (I should add, I’m
still an atheist). A common criticism of equal marriage from queer
activists is it is just another tool of assimilation; it is part of the way LGB
people are become normalised in a neoliberal society that will accept us as
normal consumers, but doesn’t really want to accept our queerness.

Going on this journey to marriage, I have ended up
challenging this, particularly with the insights from Celia Kitzinger’s
fantastic paper Speaking
as a heterosexual. In this paper Kitzinger describes the everyday ways
in talk that heterosexuality is made, and key among these is through marriage
and the associated pronouns – husband, wife, and the general presumption of an
opposite-gender partner. Indeed, until equal marriage, just ticking the box on
a form to say “married” implied heterosexuality. To be non-heterosexual had to
involve awkwardly correcting people – pointing out incorrect pronouns after you
spoke about your partner was a fairly regular occurrence in my life.

Same-sex marriage upsets this entirely, and therefore,
although I fully recognise where critics of homonormativity are coming from, I
think they underestimate the possible radical change that will come about from
widening the scope of such an incredibly heterosexual institution to us queers.
For a start, it gives us a new vocabulary to play with – husband and wife. It
also, profoundly, means that a wedded couple cannot be assumed to be
opposite-sex. If you notice someone’s wedding ring on their finger, your
thought now must be “what gender is their spouse?”. My research on housing has
really opened my eyes as to how much the heterosexual family unit is subtly
normalised in all manner of simple interactions. This will be eroded. Ironically,
the campaigners against equal marriage are right – it might destroy, or weaken
marriage; but a particular form of heterosexual marriage.

I think I note this radical possibility more intensely than
other LGB people might because of the religious aspect to our marriage. I’ve
had a lot of time to think about this. Also my husband-to-be was heavily
involved in the SEC’s “Cascade Conversation” about equal marriage and also gave
an impassioned speech about same-sex marriage at the Synod back in June (people
said afterwards what a big impact it seemed to have on the audience). So it’s something that’s been
considered quite a lot indeed. The opening liturgy of our ceremony on Saturday
emphasises how the love in our marriage reflects and reinforces the love of God
and the love of Jesus when he died for us on the cross. By getting married in
church, this is stating that this love is as bountiful for everyone equally; as
the priest presiding at the Cathedral in Vancouver on Pride Day said: God loves
us in all the ways he made us fantastically different. This liturgy could not
be more radically different from the old “honour and obey” liturgy of days of
yore that was saying God made man to dominate woman.

So I’m hopeful of equal marriage. I hope it will change
society and make heterosexuality be questioned a bit more as the norm, and
allow people to be more easily proud of their queerness in an everyday way. I’m
also hopeful for our own marriage – from what I know we’ve got good odds. The
same-sex divorce rate is the same as it is for opposite-sex couples (c. 45%,
yes, we’re as bad at this as you straights are) but we’ve made it past the
average length of the failed marriage – 10 years – already.

And trust me, as an academic, to over-intellectualise my own
sodding wedding day.

Friday, 18 August 2017

I’m currently doing a research project on LGBT+ experiences
of homelessness and living in the most deprived neighbourhoods in Scotland –
more details here. It has been funded by the British Academy and is quite
small. I was aiming for 30 participants in total. I have found it really
difficult to find participants, particularly young homeless people.

I did expect this to be the case – I’m working with a subset
of a small(ish) population. Estimates are that a quarter of young people
between 16-25 are homeless at some point, by the broadest definition (i.e.
falling out with their parents and crashing on a mate’s couch). The Albert
Kennedy Trust suggest a quarter of this quarter identified as LGBT+ (although there's quite a few problems with that). People
often don’t realise they’ve been homeless, and might not be out, so might not
define themselves within the target population. I figured using homelessness
organisations would be a good gatekeeper organisations.

I contacted quite a few homelessness organisations and still
struggled. So, I thought, where do gay people hang out and I might be able to
recruit them? Grindr!

For those of you who don’t know, Grindr was one of the first
dating apps. I believe it was actually invented by a straight guy who was
impressed with how easily his gay brother managed to hook-up in the places he
visited. You set yourself up a profile – picture optional, but it can’t be rude
– and fill in other details (including your “tribe” [otter, twink, bear etc.
I’ll leave you to Google, but don’t blame me]; your preferred sexual practices
[it seems versatile bottom is where it’s at, again Google if you don’t know],
as well as age and height and other usual stuff. It’s location based, so when
you open the app you get the photos of people in a grid with distance
increasing as you go down. There is also a “Fresh Faces” bar at the top which
lists recent joiners. You don’t swipe people away like Tinder, so it’s more
like a chatting app.

I hadn’t intended to use it for participant recruitment. In
fact I’ve been in a long-term relationship for 11 years, long before Grindr had
been invented, so I had never actually used it. I had used the precursor
website Gaydar (I can almost hear the wistful sigh from gay men of a certain
age when you mention that) so I sort of knew what it was like. Anyway, I had to
apply for a change to my ethics permission (form here for info) from my University’s General
University Ethics Panel to use it. Before I got to this stage, Mark Holton at
Plymouth University mentioned I should also check the Grindr terms and
conditions. These are quite explicit on not using it for marketing, or to
recruit people actively, but I wasn’t going to be doing this – I couldn’t tell
if anyone was suitable for my research from their profile, so this was more
lurking and seeing who approached me.

When I submitted my ethics application it was the week after
Stephen Port had been convicted for murdering four young men he had lured to
his flat using Grindr. This meant the main focus of the application was
actually the risk assessment, particularly since it was a straight male
colleague who would be doing the interviews – making sure that people recruited
this way were met in public places and that I’d talked to them briefly over the
phone to check everything was ok. This was on top of the usual assurances, such
as making sure the researcher checked in-and-out-of interviews by text message.
I also had to ensure the participants were consenting properly with full
information. I was also aware there was a reputational risk to the University –
I could chat people up on the app as a representative of my University.
Therefore I also set out that after people messaged me on the app, I would move
the discussion to email as soon as possible and provide them with full
participant information then. The usual participation and consent procedures
then kicked-in.

So I set up my profile, example below:

I changed it from that to asking if people lived in particular neighbourhoods in Edinburgh and Glasgow depending on what I was up to and where I was.

And, the burning question – how successful was it? Well, quite successful actually. I got 49 contacts by the time I wrote this blog post. Not all of them were interested in my research. More of that later. It took me a week to work out Grindr etiquette. I was expecting people to message me and say “I’d like to participate in your research.” However, you only ever start a Grindr conversation with “Hi”. My initial reply to these was an immediate “I’m only on here to recruit research participants”. After a couple of times it became apparent this was extremely rude, so it became a “Hi, are you interested in participating in my research?”

Quite a few of the contacts did fit the criteria, particularly people who had experienced homelessness, which was exactly the population I was looking for. The main problem was turning these into actual interviews. I found this paper about a sexual health project that had used Grindr to find people for a project about men-who-have-sex-with-men. They noted that they got a higher participation rate if they phoned people, not emailed them. I offered to phone or email in my message to people who said they would participate. They all wanted to be emailed. I would email. And then hear nothing. I have no idea why.

And yes, I did get people who just looked at my photo (I used a professional work photo where I do look quite cute) and messaged me for the very purposes Grindr was invented for. And so far, yes, this has also involved some extremely explicit messages. As a gay man, I was sort of expecting this to happen, but if you were to recreate this method of participant recruitment and went into this naïve and oblivious it would’ve come as a bit of a shock. A handful of other messages I got would’ve raised eyebrows out of the context, but with all of these I just ignored the messages, or if someone was a tad too persistent, I politely ended the conversation explaining I was only on the app to recruit research participants.

So, is it worth the effort to find research participants? LGBT+ people are roughly three per cent of the population, so they are pretty hard to reach. I have exhausted every single recruitment technique, apart from flyering gay bars on a Friday night, with this project and have still really struggled. Unbelievably even snowball sampling only got me two other participants (and one of them was someone’s partner and another someone’s sibling). Riffing on Michael Rosen’s book Bear Hunt I’ve been joking that “I’m going on a gay hunt, got to catch a big one”* and it really has felt like that. I think, like the public health researchers, if you were looking for people who were dating, or after no-strings-fun with a 9 inch top, for your research population, then it is definitely the place to find them. Otherwise, I think my research was a little too leftfield for your average Grindr user. They’re on it for a quick shag, or to meet the love of their life, not to discuss their housing circumstances.

I also swiftly realised there is ethnography to be done on how people present themselves on Grindr, and the rituals of introducing oneself on the app. A quick Google Scholar search identifies that this has been done. This raises the issue of how “public” social media is (as did this blog post). An ethics panel would probably not give you permission to recreate Laud Humphries’ famous Tearoom Trade participant observation of cottaging. Yet, we could probably do an ethnography of interactions in a gay bar with no issues, comparing, say, how gay men approach each other with how straight men approach women. People do not put themselves on Grindr to appear in a research project, and if I provided any more detail about some of the profiles I’d seen, people could feasibly identify them. A defence of being overly cautious on these issues is we live in a heterosexist society. As I am finding out in this project, we know next-to-bugger-all (pun intended) about the lives of LGBT+ people in very ordinary ways. As a social scientist, I believe the only way to do this is to do research, and this involves identifying people as LGBT+ and then asking them about stuff.

Anyway, this is all I have to say on the topic so far. This will be written up as a proper methods paper, don’t fear! Oh, and as I tweeted a while back – an idea for a novel: the protagonist is one of the random people that appear in someone else’s online dating profile, and a North-By-Northwest style mistaken identity adventure then starts.

*knowledgeable readers will get the many-levels on which that joke works.

Tuesday, 18 July 2017

The most recent book I finished reading was Harriet Harman’s
A Woman’s Work. I was interested in
reading it after it had been trailed in The
Guardian. I wasn’t going to “review” it much at all; I was mainly going to recommend
people buy it, and give my copy to my mum. But two things made me thing again.
First was the “anniversary” of when, as stand-in leader of the Labour Party in
opposition, Harman advised her MPs to vote for welfare reform in 2015. This is
symbolically portrayed as when the tide turned in favour of Jeremy Corbyn in
the Labour leadership race. Harman became the totemic “Blairite”. Ironically,
for the theme of the book, I’d argue there’s an inherent sexism in there – the presumption
is Harman, as a woman cannot have her own views; she is just the stooge of the
men around her. Secondly, I asked my Twitter followers if they’d like a review,
and I got overwhelmed

I just want to pick up on three aspects of the book that
were noteworthy to me. Firstly, life was really quite exceptionally bad for
women before 1997 and it’s quite a bit better now. It’s not perfect, but thanks
to Harriet Harman and her allies in the women’s movement, it’s quite a bit
better. This seems to come from something that only a woman could really do –
listen to women’s concerns, empathise with them, and make the practical changes
needed. For example, being a naïve man I was not aware how stupidly moralistic
and patriarchal the rules regarding lone parent benefit were. It was designed
on the presumption women should not be in work. They should be in a
relationship with a man who would earn the money for the household. Even if he
was abusing her. As Secretary of State for Social Security, Harman changed that
through the New Deal for Lone Parents.

Another good example this this approach, and the pragmatic
challenges it led to, is the minimum wage. The men-dominated trades unions had
pushed for this to be half the median wage. Harman realised that this rate would be good for men in full time work, but
probably lead to thousands of low-paid women losing their jobs. She argued
forcefully that such work was not “pin money” for households, but a vital part
of their income, the freedom of these women, and that many of these women were lone
parents who would lose their only income. She pushed this argument with the support of the trade union that represented poorly paid women workers in the textile industry the National Union of Knitwear, Footwear and Apparel Trades. The result was the Low Pay
Commission. Of course, this led to her gaining enemies in the trades unions

It sort of goes without saying that Harriet Harman (or “Harperson”
as she was *hilariously* referred to) has received endless sexist, misogynist
abuse in her life. The reporting associated with the book’s launch focused on
her being
sexually harassed by a lecturer at the University of York. This was
early-on, and shocking, but arguably not the worst. Taking on a men-dominated
labour movement through advocating for women workers, and all-women shortlists,
Harman was subject to truly shocking abuse and exclusion, as were many other
women. The story of the introduction of all-women shortlists should make many
men in the Labour movement utterly ashamed and should lead to public apologies
at the way women were treated. Of course, it won’t.

The third reason I liked the book came to me at the end – it’s
tucked away in the acknowledgements. She writes:

“I’d always denounced political memoirs as male vanity projects
and vowed never to write mine – so this book requires an explanation. I read
the mounting pile of memoirs of the men who’d been my Cabinet colleagues. They
wrote about themselves and each other but there was nothing about women.”
(p.383)

She goes on:

“Because I didn’t plan to write my memoirs, I never wrote a
diary during my time in politics. I thoroughly disapproved of colleagues who
sat in meetings writing theirs; I thought they should have been focusing on
getting things done in the here and now, rather than anticipating their place
in history.” (p.383)

There’s a wonderfully humility and passion here. After I read it I just thought "go Harriet!" She got into politics to change women’s lives for
the better. The book is not a memoir, or a biography. It is a book about the
progress the women’s movement had made over the past 50 years, from Harman’s
perspective, and it is a joy to read because of that, and incredibly
informative. The only weakness is she is not a brilliant writer and the prose
can be clunky. I imagine it’s how I might write a book – I’m very good at
reports and reasonably good at extended academic writing, but would struggle in
the genre of this type of book. But it’s definitely worth reading. Being the
first Mother of the House is a richly deserved accolade for Harman for all her
work in her 25 years in Parliament.

Friday, 7 July 2017

As I’ve blogged about before here, an emerging
finding from my current research on LGBT housing and homelessness is the
reticence of heterosexual-identifying staff in organisations to ask service
users their sexual identity. In 20 days’ time, it will be the 50th
anniversary of the decriminalisation of sex between two men, in private, in England
and Wales when the Sexual Offences
Act 1967 received royal assent. The Hansard
record of the debates relating to the parliamentary bill given an
interesting, if alarming, insight into social attitudes at the time.

This has led to quite a bit of focus on changing social
attitudes to same-sex relationships. For example, the National Centre for
Social Research tweeted this graph from the British Social Attitudes Survey
demonstrating how we’ve become more accepting of same-sex relationships.

Yet my lived experience, and also my research findings
suggest something different – an acceptance, but a remaining discomfort. I’ve
got to think through this because one of the ways I was thinking of “queer-ying”
policy, and to hit home my point that it should be normal
to ask people their sexual identity, was to do a cartoon gently mocking the
assumption that asking people if they are straight, gay or bisexual, is asking
a question about what they get up to between the sheets (or anywhere else they
may choose to have sex). I still think this will work, but I’ve realised I’ve
got to do some more work on it.

As part of making sense of my data from my project I’m
reading into queer theory. I’m not an expert – in a disciplinary sense, I live
in policy studies – so I’ve been going to “readers”. It’s interesting for me
with my historians perspective on as a lot of the texts in them are quite dated
and pre-exist much of the legislative progress of the last decade in the UK and
elsewhere. Here, I want to draw on the excerpt from Ahmed in the Routledge
Queer Studies Reader, ‘Queer Feelings’. She focuses on the discomfort
generated by being “queer”, or non-normative, and the way this rubs up against
a heteronormative society. I read a lot of the chapter thinking of Panti Bliss’
famous speech on oppression.

It has also got me thinking a bit more about the discomfort
people say they would feel if they had to ask people their sexuality. As I
wrote previously, I do empathise with this discomfort a lot – I would probably
feel a little bit apprehensive. Reading Ahmed though has got me focusing on what exactly is discomforting? Arguably,
marriage equality has garnered such support because it is assimilationist – it
is gay people doing what straight people do, pairing up, settling down, and
having sex just with one another.

So is it the sex that a heteronormative society finds so discomfiting?
I did a little experiment on this myself because I noticed that my tweets
regarding LGBT issues got very little attention. Searching for a GIF once I
found one that was from a gay porn film. It didn’t take much to find quite a
few others on the Twitter GIF search. So I posted a hard core gay porn GIF, the
obliquely showed a sexual act between two men, every day for a week. I got two
likes, and one of them was for a GIF that was a passionate kiss. This
suggested, to me, at least an ambivalence towards sexual acts between men.

Particularly in the UK we find all sex discomfiting.
However, we are getting better at having open discussions about heterosexual
sex – just not necessarily the right discussions with the right people. But we’re
happy to accept lesbian and gay couples, and indeed celebrate them through
marriage, yet when we consider them actually having sex, I suspect we’ve got an
awful lot further to go on social attitudes.

Wednesday, 5 July 2017

I read a 500-page biography of Jürgen Habermas so you don't have to. Actually, it's quite a good read, better than I feared. There were times when I actually couldn't put it down, and I'm not a fan of biographies generally. I was read this tome to review for Local Government Studies. Given the book was so long, I asked the book reviews editor to give me the equivalent of two reviews, but he didn't think it was of sufficient interest to the readers of LGS to warrant the full version so it got brutally edited down to 800 words. I don't mind, this was what we agreed when I went in to write it. The shorter version will be published soon, and in the mean time, you can read the 1,600-word version.

Habermas: A Biography

Stefan Müller-Doohm (tr. Daniel Steuer)

Polity Press (Cambridge)

Hardback: 978-0-7456-8906-7

£9.99

As an undergraduate studying history, a Professor was attempting to explain
Habermas’ thesis in The Structural
Transformation of the Public Sphere in a lecture I was attending. They described how, like
all German intellectuals, Habermas “dived in deeper, and came out muddier”. For
many in the English-speaking academic world, this is one caricature they hold;
for others Habermas is seen as an irrelevance, with his utopian vision of
uncorrupted discourse being empirically disproved by a “post-truth” world of
discursive conflict. Yet, when we look at the emphasis put on deliberation in
governance reforms (the latest trend being co-production) or the campaigns for
rational discourse in society to counter “fake news”, arguably, we are seeing
the enduring impact of Habermas’ philosophical and political project, and his
ever greater relevance in the present day.

Stefan Müller-Doohm’s biography of Habermas, now translated
into English, gives an incredibly rich insight into Habermas’ intellectual
project, but more importantly the personal drive behind it. Born in 1929, and
growing up in the west German town of Gummersbach, Habermas’ cleft palate
marked him out as different all his life. From 1933 this difference became of
greater importance as it marked Habermas as a “degenerate” within the Nazi
regime. However, like many of his generation, he was a member of the Hitler
Youth, and trained as a first-aider and is photographed in marching to the
frontline in August 1944in the book.

What is very apparent from this biography is the deep impact
these early experiences had on Habermas for his entire life. From the
mid-1950s, Habermas started down the road to becoming the public intellectual
he is widely known as within continental Europe. Writing with the milieu of the
new democracy of the Bundesrepublik, he
was committed to creating a critical, public discourse. This was within a
country that had a very fragile democracy, of the sort even now we can barely
imagine – where de-Nazification had been partial so as to leave some
functioning bureaucracy; any alignment with Marxist doctrines ran the risk of
individuals being accused of being sympathisers with the Demokratische Republik. This was a country where it was not until
1969 that Willy Brandt became the Social Democratic Chancellor, and the CDU/CSU
dominance seemingly teetered on the brink of become authoritarian.

With this background illuminated by Müller-Doohm, the drive
behind Habermas’ intellectual project become apparent. In sum, it is the
recognition that democracy is fragile, historically contingent, and it needs
explaining by social science. What is more, democracy also needs supporting,
pragmatically and theoretically. This drive to use critical theory to embed a
deep democracy that delivers equality, was in a context where Habermas had to
negotiate between conservative university authorities and the warring factions
that had emerged from the Frankfurt School. It is these moments, where the
ideals of critical theory, or of contemporary left thought, bang up against the
reality of navigating the contradictions of liberal capitalism, that are the
most interesting of the book, and produce some page-turning sections.

In this review, I want to mention two, both occurring around
the same time in that period of revolutionary fervour 1968. A thread running
through the book is Habermas’ close collaboration with the publisher Suhrkamp and close friendship with
Siegfried Unseld, owner and director, who turned it into an intellectual
powerhouse in post-war West Germany. This included Habermas’ role in editing
the Edition Suhrkamp book series. In
a closely described section, Müller-Doohm explains how Unseld’s editorial staff,
inspired by wider revolutionary fervour, presented an editorial charter to
Unseld asking for the publisher to be “socialized” (p.151). Alarmed and
supportive of Unseld, Habermas travelled to Frankfurt in October 1968 and, as
described by Unseld:

“using all his theoretical armour, presented the thesis that
it would be nonsensical if a publishing house that brought out the right kind
of progressive literature…was exposed to an experiment that would put the
publisher’s present impact at risk.” (p.152)

The irony of one of the greatest critical thinkers of modern
Europe negotiating against workers’ rights, in favour of a capitalism that
could afford to publish his works and make them widely read across Germany, and
the world, is somewhat pointed.

The second incident which highlights Habermas’ ambiguous
position, is his response to student rebellions at this time. In the mid-1960s
Habermas was at the heart of protests against the CDU-CSU-led Grand Coalition and
its authoritarian tendencies. Along with protests against the Vietnam War,
Habermas became embroiled in student demonstrations. It is clear Habermas’ was
deeply committed to reform of higher education in West Germany. One of his
earliest pieces of research had been on higher education students, considering
the potential of them to drive social change. Habermas’ regularly spoke at student
occupations (although it seems he was a little less keen when it was his own
university being occupied). In 1969 Habermas’ collected writings on university
reform were published as Protestbewegung
und Hochschulreform (Protest Movement and University Reform).

However, in June 1967 the students’ union of the Freie
Universität in Berlin protested against a state visit by the Shah of Persia. In
the resulting brutal police break-up of the protest, a 26-year-old student
Benno Ohnesorg was shot and killed. As student protests developed, Habermas
supported the protests “but at the same time he also warned against an activism
at any cost and against the danger of ‘provoking a transformation of the
indirect violence of institutions into manifest violence.’” (p.141). Habermas’
was heavily criticised by the leader of the students’ movement Rudi Durschke,
and in-turn, he denounced their ideology as “left-wing fascism”. This led to
the tide to turn against Habermas, with student groups now distancing
themselves from him.

These stories from formative years for Habermas, going onto
Habermas’ period as director of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of the
Scientific-Technical World in Starnberg, are the most interesting. It was at
the Max Planck institute where Habermas wrote the Theory of Communicative Action and Müller-Doohm does a sterling job
summarising the main thesis across a few pages.

From the period of the late
1970s, the biography, unfortunately, becomes a little formulaic and something
of a hagiography. Endless visiting professorships, prizes and the spreading
importance of Habermas’ thought through the world are narrated. On reflection
this could just be the result of where Habermas’ career had got to – this is
the life of a global scholar. It could also be a result of a more careful
curation of his public profile by Habermas, as his fame grew.

Why should a reader of Local
Government Studies be interested in this (enormous) book? Participatory
initiatives have now become a norm in governing practices at a local level. In
manuals of good governance, countries are exalted to bring citizens into
decision-making processes to make them better. In our scholarship we can focus
on the policy initiatives that led to such participation institutions – for
example, the Skeffington Report into participation in the planning in the
United Kingdom. It is easy for us to get swept up in a critique of such
initiatives as utterly failing to meet the utopian goals they set themselves, for
example, using a Foucauldian critique to portray citizens as dupes doing what
government wants them to do.

Yet very few of us would now question that such initiatives
should exist, and that good quality discourse is essential to a lively
democracy. Our revulsion to the use of “fake news” and ambiguity in what we
count as the “truth” belies a deeper tradition from the enlightenment to seek
the truth. Underlying these concerns is Habermas’ concept of a rational
discourse among free and equal actors. In the English-speaking context, this
remains implicit – we don’t get to read Habermas’ numerous contributions to Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and De Welt that make him a very public
scholar in Germany.

As already touched upon, it is clear from this biography
that Habermas himself could not, necessarily, always live up to his own ideals.
Another theme, is that throughout his career Habermas has benefited from many
structural privileges that his critics, particularly Iris Marion Young, have
suggested mean that his ideal speech situation can never come to pass. Put
simply, the only woman who really has a role in this book is his wife Ute
Wesselhöft, and then as an academic spouse, rather than a person in her own
right. All the other key characters in Habermas’ life were men. His career was
developing during a period when structural inequalities were much more likely
to hold-back women and minority groups, so this is partly understandable as a
product of the time. However, in the positions of authority he has had, such as
founding the Max Planck institute, Habermas seems to have done little in terms
of practical action, as his theoretical position would suggest he should, to
address such structural issues. One would hope as a leading critical thinker
Habermas was aware of such issues, but this is never apparent from the book.

To conclude, this book is an astounding overview of the
life, and intellectual development, of one of Europe’s greatest thinkers, and
one who is neglected in English-speaking social science. Müller-Doohm’s
archival research is awe-inspiring. Reading the book from the perspective of
the UK, with dominance of the tabloid media; a referendum that was recently won
on a blatant untruth (the pledge Brexit would lead to £350 million for the NHS);
where we are “tired of experts”, it is easy to scoff at Habermas’ ideal speech
situation. What becomes clear from the book though, is that Germany does seem
to have this – through the scholarly debates on the pages of the leading
newspapers, major issues of the day are discussed. The continuing legacy for
all of us from Habermas’ work is that we must keep our fragile democracies, at
all levels, alive with discourse.

Monday, 3 July 2017

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away (well, when we
had a UK Government that was thinking about localism and “The Big Society”) the
Arts and Humanities Research Council’s Connected Communities programme funded
three projects, along with the UK Department for Communities and Local
Government (DCLG), to see how the research the programme had invested in so far
could help policy. Skip forward a year and the teams involved in doing these reviews
concluded that they had not, exactly, gone to plan. So, I ended up joining them
on a project called Translation
Across Borders to try and find out why.

Well, I have a paper out based on this project in Evidence & Policy.
I’ll attempt to summarise it here.

Now, there is absolutely oodles of research out there, across
numerous disciplines, on how and why policy-makers use evidence in their
decisions, and the barriers to this. The unique value-added of this project was
that it was co-produced with a civil servant who was actually involved in
policy-making. Our co-author, Robert Rutherfoord, is a Principal Social
Research at DCLG, and did fieldwork with me.

My role was to interview all the academics who had
participated in producing the original policy reviews, with Robert, and find
out what they had done and the barriers they found in taking their evidence
into a policy-making environment. Our literature review found that doing this
is remarkably rare – us academics seem to love asking policy-makers what they
think the barriers are, and how they use evidence, but we don’t ask us
academics what we think the barriers are. This is all the more surprising given
all the wailing and gnashing of teeth regarding the Research Excellence
Framework’s measurement of socio-economic impact since 2013.

What did we find? In the interpretive approach we took to
analysing the data, three things stood out. Firstly, as academics, we construct
our identities as biographies (like everyone else on the planet). These are key
meaning-making devices for us and help situate us, and our practices in the
here-and-now. Secondly, these biographies are strongly linked to disciplinary
identities. Unsurprisingly, some disciplines – like policy studies – more
commonly do work with policy-makers, or attempt to affect change in policy,
than other disciplines. This is a bit of a “no shit, Sherlock” finding, but
surprisingly it is not dealt with a lot in the literature, perhaps because the
need for diverse disciplines to affect policy-making has only emerged in the
last decade and they are only just beginning to self-reflect. On this count, I
find the delightfully naïve debates in mainstream political science interesting
when you compare them to policy studies, who have been concerning themselves
with this issue for the last 70 years. The final insight was that institutional
pressures, particularly the demand to produce 4* journal articles for the REF
means that the sorts of activities that are recognised to help deliver “impact”
– developing working relationships with policy-makers and networks of influence
– are not prioritised or encouraged within internal performance management
systems.

Now, a lot of this will come as no surprise to many
academics. Indeed it didn’t necessarily come as a surprise to us. What did come
as a surprise to us, and why this research is important, was that this our
civil servants we were co-producing with did not know about much of this,
particularly things like the impact of the REF on behaviour and incentive
structures. Therefore, our recommendation as to what should be done better is a
bit different to most other similar projects. Whereas a lot of “toolkits” and
other training focused on getting academic evidence into policy-making focuses
on “knowing your audience”, from a variety of different perspectives, we
instead focused on the need for academics to know themselves better. Because, basically, academics are weird. We
behave in a lot of ways that are completely alien to those outwith academia.
And we need to pause and think about this every now and then. And also,
policy-makers who want to work with academics would do well just to spend a
short amount of time learning about what makes them tick, and understanding
that there is diversity in what academics do, and how they do it.

To this end we did create some tools from this project to
try and make this process a bit easier. One of these is some fun “academic
archetype” cards that can be used to prompt reflection, and also help
policy-makers understand academics a bit better. If you want to use these, please
drop me an email, and this can
be arranged. I’ll be presenting them at a “Research Bite” seminar in the
University of Stirling Library Enterprise Zone on 2 August at 12:30. I’ll also
probably bring them out at a session at the Australian National University on
11 October at 13:00, and possibly when I’m at the Department of Social Policy
and Intervention, University of Oxford from the 13 November for a week.

We’re just organising Gold OA or Green OA for the paper, but
in the meantime drop me an email if you want a copy and you don’t subscribe to E&P.

Friday, 30 June 2017

I got a new qualification back in May. I’m usually very
proud of getting new qualifications, including my PGCert in Academic Practice,
which most people treat as a burden. I didn’t tweet or brag about this one
though because it was a leadership qualification. I am now an accredited leader
to level 5 of the Institute of Learning and Management leadership framework. I
was ashamed of this qualification because of one of the key learning points
from the course for me – that when we think of “leaders” in English, we think
of, well ultimately:

A man. Shouting. Bullying people to do what he wants them to
do. And ultimately what he wants people to do is wrong.

I ended up doing the course because after I was promoted to
Senior Lecturer last year I ended up leading a couple of key pieces of work in
the University – leading a research programme, and leading an Athena SWAN
application. I realised in October 2016 that I was writing about how good the
Aurora leadership programme was for women and thought I need something like
that. Fortunately for me, a space had come up on the University’s ILM5 course
that was starting the following week. Luckily I could make all the sessions
over the six months. I realised quite how much I needed it when I was walking through Waverley Station the day after I'd said to HR I would do it and I burst into tears realising that I'd said "I can't do this anymore and need some help."

Because of my preconceptions about leadership, I went in
very skeptically and determined to have a feminist approach to my learning.
Chatting to colleagues, they suggested speaking to Frances Patterson who leads our
social work leadership courses. She put me onto shared leadership theory that
is heavily informed by feminism, and particularly the work of Joyce Fletcher on
post-heroic leadership.

A lot of contemporary leadership theory is based on
neuroscience, and I have to confess, I remain unconvinced of that. I’m just too
focused on understanding sociologically to accept psychological evidence for
human behaviour.

Engaging with the literature and realising that the way I
operate in organisations is good
leadership that is empirically demonstrated to lead to better performance
was really eye-opening and empowering. As I say, I think the word “leadership” in
English is too corrupted now. If we were into compounds nouns in English, like
the Germans, I’d say empoweringcaringsharingrolemodelperson would be a much
better word.

As part of the course I got some leadership coaching
sessions with Michele
Armstrong. I had my last session this morning and it gave me time to
reflect on my “leadership journey”. A big part of my leadership reflection was
getting to my core values – what makes me tick. These are helping the most
vulnerable in society and delivering equality. Another key value for me is
competence, and getting the job done and delivering change.

One key reflection, that I need to discuss with others, is
how I come across on this. Although these are my values, and I would say they are
progressive, I don’t immediately leap to activism, resistance and complaint to
go about delivering them. I like to go with the grain and use bureaucracy for
positive ends. Also, in a HE context, a lot of the things that are the focus of
ire – audit
and “administration”
– because they are “Neil Librul”, I actually think are not all bad. Following Clive
Barnett, I always look for the shades of grey in our friend Neil. He’s not
a totalising force. A lot of his tools – like audit, or performance measures –
can be used to progressive ends. I feel more comfortable in this space and
doing this work, and I think I need to talk about it a bit more as I'm worried I come across as a management stooge.

I keep my “resistance” quieter. For me, it means using the
inefficiency of bureaucracy to thwart its own ends – no one will notice if I
don’t fill in that spreadsheet I’ve been asked to complete. I’ll conveniently
forget to forward on requests to protect colleagues from something either I
could do, or I think is ill-advised and needs to be rethought. In working with
colleagues, I’ll focus on how exciting their ideas are and encourage them to
take them further, rather than bash them over the head with targets. If you
meet the targets it’s a bonus, but your job should be enjoyable, empowering and
intellectual stimulating. The chances are, if you are doing that sort of job
then your “customers” (students) will be happy and getting good learning (and a
Gold TEF award) and you’ll be doing the sort of research that will tick the REF
boxes.

I suppose a key frustration of mine though is that on these leadership and coaching courses I go on, everyone has been like me - already a very good leader, who just needs to space to reflect and some theory and practical ideas to hone their skills. That we have said to ourselves that we need to develop these skills, to me, says that we are good leaders. Those who think they are good leaders, who practice heroic leadership, aren't reflexive enough to attend such courses and yet they quite often are in leadership positions.

So, I am proud of being a leader, and my leadership skills.
I still don’t like the word leadership though.

About Me

I'm a Senior Lecturer in Social Policy at the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Stirling.
I blog about urban policy, cycling and other ephemera in a semi-professional manner. All posts represent personal opinions.